The Active Phytoremediation Wall System is a modular system of pods, housing hydroponic plants. Its main purpose is to encourage airflow and contribute to the quality of life through its air cleaning capacities. The project is a result of a collaborative research between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
It is a bio-mechanical hybrid system that produces ‘fresh air’ from within buildings, thereby reducing the energy consumption. Because the plants’ roots are exposed, instead of being buried in soil, the plants’ air-cleaning capacity increases by 200 to 300 percent. The pods themselves are made from vacuum-formed plastic, and the form allows the maximum amount of air to reach the root rhizomes while using the minimum amount of material. It also creates a beautiful base for the plants. The wall system can be installed in large commercial interiors, but works equally well in small settings—a four-module system in an apartment would have the impact of 800 to

A website about research in the field of Architecture. I have been exploring novel ways to passively harvest energy from around buildings with devices and mechanisms and finding ways to make it do useful work, this website is about that ongoing exploration.
This is a research topic where there is an opportunity to gain because the principal energy resource is the sun which is completely free. A measure of success in this area is to balance the available energy from ambient resources with the possibility for buildings that respond to the dynamic changes in their surrounding environment. This is a research topic that is as much about observation of what there is to be harvested as creative thinking about matching it in time and place with the design of buildings.
I think that this can be achieved in effective but subtle ways in the passive design of building enclosures, and this is a research topic that has been explored through doing design projects to demonstrate this. Please explore

Future Cities Lab’s HYDRAMAX Port Machines project proposes a radical rethinking of San Francisco’s urban waterfront post sea-level rise. The proposal renders the existing hard edges of the waterfront as new “soft systems” that would include aquatic parks, community gardens, wildlife refuges and aquaponic farms. A synthetic architecture is introduced that blurs the distinction between building, landscape, infrastructure and machine. Using thousands of sensors and motorized components, the massive urban scale robotic structure harvests rainwater and fog, while modulating air flow, solar exposure and intelligent building systems.